Archive for the ‘Repositories’ Category

As well as resolving (or attempting to resolve…) resource access problems this week, I’ve also been busy creating a guide to depositing research to UBIR which may be useful to anyone who has published research, and in particular who may be considering submitting to the next REF.

The guide provides support on how to actually deposit to UBIR – which is a simple process – as well as help on ensuring that any items deposited are copyright cleared. The benefit of self-archiving is that you can ensure that your research is uploaded when you want it to be, and as authors, you are often best placed to make decisions about subject classifications and indeed the school to which you are affiliated. Why not have a go and see what you think?

We have no plans to compel all authors to upload their own work and will continue to upload on your behalf. However, some of you may prefer to self-archive, and our guide is just one of things we have been working on to make this process as easy as possible.

If you would like any further help or information on any aspect of engaging in open access, don’t hesitate to contact the UBIR Team.

If you plan to submit research for REF 2020, there is one crucial thing you need to be aware of:

To be eligible for submission to the post-2014 REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication.

HEFCE Policy on Open Access

This applies to conference proceedings and journal articles and is applicable to any research that is accepted for publication after 1st April 2016.

The HEFCE Policy on Open Access outlines this requirement and provides extensive guidance. If you are planning on submitting research to REF 2020 you must comply with this guidance.

In order to fulfil this requirement, your work can be deposited in UBIR. Simply send any electronic version of the paper in question with full bibliographic details to ubir@bolton.ac.uk and we will do the rest. If your work has been published in an open access journal you will still need to ensure it is available in UBIR.

Due to further development work, UBIR may be unavailable from 9 a.m. on Friday 19th February until around 2 p.m. Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

On the subject of UBIR, I thought I’d share something rather exciting. Yes, that’s right, I have UBIR statistics now! I’ll save detailed discussion for another time but for now, I’ll just leave you with the knowledge that over the course of the past 24 months, there have been nearly 62,000 full-text downloads from UBIR. Amazing! So if you’re an academic and are in any doubt as to whether or not putting your research in UBIR will mean it’s read, I can confirm that yes, that is indeed the case!

I’ll leave that for now: more stats goodies will be brought to you shortly…

OAPEN-UK, a project funded by JISC and the AHRC that has been set up to investigate the issues surrounding the publication and availability of monographs and to provide a roadmap for the future of this type of publication, has created a guide to open access monograph publishing for arts, humanities and social sciences researchers. The guide is available to download here.

The aims of OAPEN-UK, which is linked with the European OAPEN project, are as follows:

The publication of open access books presents a number of challenges, and it is hoped that the outcomes of the OAPEN-UK project will go a long way to address these challenges.

The good news is that achieving open access for journal articles is a little simpler, and here at the University of Bolton journal articles, conference papers and reports can be made open access by depositing the work in UBIR. Research in UBIR is open access and discoverable both via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and the Library’s new Discover@Bolton service. Many publishers allow the deposit of full-text research in repositories. Moreover, any research that it to be submitted for REF2020 must be made open access: deposit in UBIR will fulfil this requirement, which has been set by HEFCE. For further information, contact the UBIR Team.

If you make use of the journals available on the Wiley platform, be aware that if in any one session you attempt to download more than 25 articles, you may presented with a CAPTCHA screen and asked to enter the code you see. You may well have come across this before, and once you have entered the code, you will be able to proceed as normal to download the article.

In other news, UBIR is still unavailable, but we’re hoping this issue will be resolved as soon as possible.

I hope you have all had a restful Bank Holiday weekend. It seems that UBIR has too, as it is now accessible as normal. Apologies for any inconvenience caused, and as ever, if you do encounter any problems with accessing any of our electronic resources, don’t hesitate to get in touch.